I don't think anyone owns a 350+ HP sports car to drive in a safe and legal manner all the time
You're wrong. Also very presumptuous. There are many things a high powered sports car can do safely and legally that your average mommy sedan or SUV cannot. The vehicles can reduce all kinds of risk (passing with much larger safety margins, better [safer] stopping, better [safer] cornering), as it turns out, both the horsepower and the sporty handling can come in quite handy.
That's exactly how I drove mine for the last few decades. No speeding tickets because -- ready -- no speeding. No patching out, no taking corners faster than posted (although I was *definitely* taking the corners significantly more safely than non sports vehicles were.) The only downside, really, was that to get the most out of the thing, I had to use soft compound tires, and they just don't last as long, and they cost a lot, and they scrub off like a rat bastard when you have to make a sudden stop (deer, other road hazards.) I have some truly hair-raising stories about putting flat spots on my tires -- but were it a lesser vehicle, the stories would have been about front-end impacts.
All this, in a car that got decent milage (twin turbos ftw) and easily exceeded your 350 HP line in the sand. If I had *wanted* to speed and otherwise misbehave, it was right there at my fingertips. I leave it as an exercise for you to imagine why I never did.
Polarize the cockpit windows so that light from a lower angle is blocked; then provide a low angle view with a couple of cameras, one that only sees in green, one that only sees in red, and digitally process them so that the one that isn't blocking is the one you see.
Also, hang a couple of optically tracking missiles under the fuselage; when a laser is detected, send the missile down the reciprocal angle, following the laser. Doesn't even need a warhead. I'll wager that a 500...1000 mph impact from a 10 lb missile would seriously impede the idiot holding the laser without a lot of collateral damage. Well, maybe some. Oh well.:)
Viewing angle is one of the factors missing from the stereo-vision hack being marketed as "3d" today. Another is focal depth.
Supplying 64 different angles of view is (barely) a start. It'll still foul up your visual processing, though, because the focus cues to your brain are entirely wrong. And that, unfortunately, leads to neurological problems like headaches.
You're not going to see actual 3d displays for a while. First we need the tech, then we need it standardized so manufacturers have a consistent target to shoot for, then we need content, for which we're going to need new recording tech...
they don't live under a dictatorship anymore. Even WWII had collateral damage.
Yes, they just live under a new dictatorship, a religious one, one that is completely unable to maintain civil order but has no problem whatsoever imposing a rule just as oppressive as the one Saddam did. As for WWII, there was a real threat to be countered there, one of hugely more power and intent than anything Saddam ever even dreamed of. The one time he actually tried something along those lines (Kuwait), he got stepped on like a bug and ran home to mommy, which was fine.
There's no question that when a country steps outside of its own borders and makes war on others without the specific pretext of stopping exactly that act, it must be stopped. Unfortunately, the country that fits that definition in the case of the 2nd Iraq war is not Iraq -- it is the USA. Even more unfortunately, there is no one big enough to stop us, or even slow us down, when we do evil things.
What countries do within their own borders must be the business of that country. If you think otherwise, you just completely justified an invasion of the USA by anyone who cares to do it for failure to abide by its own constitution. Our leadership is corrupt from top to bottom - executive, judiciary, legislature, political parties - and our actions reprehensible by our own standards. But I suspect you'd say that it's entirely our job to work out our own problems. What concerns me is that you would not say the same for the Iraqis.
Neither could Iraq. The only difference was that there was a country so big and powerful that it made no difference. We imposed our will on them in the oldest, most vile manner possible: By murderous force, without any right, on a sovereign country.
By every measure, the 2nd Iraq war was unjustified, the consequences horrific, the perpetrators criminal, and by that, I don't mean the pawns, the soldiers, but those who steered this ship of terror, Bush and Cheney and every minion they had that participated in the faking of intelligence and the misdirecting of the public as to any involvement whatsoever with 9/11.
But overlaying all of this is the simple truth that collectively: we cannot trust our government, we cannot control our government, and we do not care enough to do anything about it.
This has been true for some time, from things we allow it to do to us, from the war on drugs to the fear-mongering used to crush our liberties subsequent to 9/11, to the completely unjustified actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 9/11 perpetrators were mostly Saudi with 2...3 from Egypt, Lebanon and the UAE. No one from Afghanistan, no one from Iraq. The justification that they went to school in Iraq kind of skips over the idea that more of them went to school in the UK and Saudi Arabia. The idea that OBL was hiding there so we had to destroy an entire country to get at him was both wrong, and not really justified by the fact that he was pleased, but surprised, to hear that we had been attacked. The fact that we shot him when we had overwhelming force on our side and didn't bring him to any witness stand is, at least, suspicious.
Do I claim to know what happened? No. But I will say this: if you step back from the official story, the first thing you note is that this puzzle fits together really, really badly if you use the lines drawn by the US government. It's likely, IMHO, to be close to the real truth -- the best and most enduring lies usually are -- but it clearly isn't the truth. We know of many problems: There were no aluminum rods being used for centrifuges. There were no WMDs. Neither country -- Iraq or Afghanistan -- had much, if anything, to do with our being attacked. Saddam had, in fact, given us access to every site of any consequence. Almost everything Bush and Cheney said was distorted or outright false. Both undertakings failed to even vaguely resemble the minimalist interventions we were sold.
The lesson is that the government has control of the picture they present, and that we will, no matter if the consequence is our liberties at home or the lives of others across the sea, accept that picture and back them in almost any action.
I prefer the explanation that begins with what the Gaussian lays at my feet: More than half the people are really, really stupid. All of the people are subject to heavy attempts at deception to get them to comply. Even very smart people will fall prey to this until they obtain data that comes from sources that are not mangling it to fit a false picture.
I don't think we can fix this. Under the present model, our congress and judiciary are wholly bought and paid for, entrenched in a way that the public really doesn't understand through political leadership that transcends elections and lobbyists that exert the will of a privileged few who are subject to zero oversight by the public.
As to Twitter, Twitter is a form of the voice of the public, but it's really no different in its reach than the voices of big forums (and search engines) ten years ago, and there were plenty of those, including this one. Twitter is different in that 140 characters isn't enough to make a case for anything; I refer you to this very post: You may completely disagree with me, and if you do, likely you'll couch that disagreement in the form of a claim that I haven't made my case, even though I took the time to cite quite a few facts which you can easily confirm supporting it. Imagine if I had tried to use twitter to make the same case -- would
While I agree that the content providers are out of control and that the congress is in fact just their legal arm there is still the problem that content has a cost to produce. If everyone didn't pay for it and everyone stole it then the content would dry up.
Some content does. Notably movies. Music, not so much. I'm a musician, I have a complete 32 track studio in my home, along with a full band's worth of instruments. If you brought me several rhythm guitarists, a singer, a keyboard player, a bassist, a drummer and a lead player, all without gear, I could set them up, record them, either together or by individual tracks, and produce a high quality master CD for them for zero cost beyond what I've already invested -- and what I've invested (some years back now) is less than a cheap car, and even that was far more than you'd have to spend today to do the same thing. Or, if I went acoustic, I could walk into a bar, sit down, and begin to play and sing. No cost other than my time. Dinner, a few beers (not too many or the performance... ugh, lol) maybe a few bucks in a hat... that'd make it practical, if the audiences found me worthy. Attention from the opposite sex used to go a long way too, though today, I'm settled down.
So bands... no. Most television productions aren't worth a plugged nickel. The acting is terrible, the scripts worse. Something like Avatar or the new Star Trek... some spending happening there and no way around it as yet. Less in the future, I think, but still, gotta give your point to you on that front. All I can say there is I own both recordings; not even a slight urge to grab them for free. Well worth the cost. I'd like to be able to back them up, lest something happen like what happened to Heavy Metal (rights bitch fight), or perhaps one of the kids using it for a clay pigeon, etc. I can't.
If everyone didn't pay for it and everyone stole it then the content would dry up.
No, you really can't make that argument. There wouldn't have been any music, opera, plays, street performers prior to about 1920 if that was the case. But there were. There are other forms of funding that the arts can extract from society than direct charge for recordings. We can ague the merit of those methods, but you can't say they didn't work, because they most assuredly did. I suspect they'd work again, and in such an environment, we'd see some very fine performers, as well as a good bit more variety. But that is, of course, just my opinion.
What you're missing here is that music, and I presume other forms of performance are, is a joy to produce. I'd kick you out of the way to get a space to play. It's not always about money. Ask yourself if you'd have to be paid to have sex. It's kind of like that. I couldn't tell you how many times I've played for free, both solo and with bands. And I'm pretty good -- fifty years of experience now, rock, blues, hard rock, even some folk, that's me. I just love music and performing musically, and that's true for a very large portion of the other musicians I've known over the years. Fame isn't the prime motivator for everyone, nor is money. Sex, well, yeah.;)
I personally try my best to not purchase music and content from other than the artist.
This is an excellent strategy and I encourage you to pursue it. I always buy a CD from a live performance, if they offer one. Or several, hell, I'll buy your whole catalog if given a chance and you gave me a nice evening.
What you have to do, though, to make that strategy really effective, is get everyone you know to pursue it, and they their acquaintances, etc., ad infinitum.
Several things. The irony of the prohibitionist saying that people using drugs could never admit they were wrong and so needed to be stood up to, during an evening where a great deal of what he was saying was wrong, and people were standing up to him, was quite poignant.
The lesson here is that even when the arguments are couched in terms of empirical data, the prohibitionists are in no way inclined to listen. The defender of drug prohibition was an ex-government figure; even outside the context of having to back the administration that put him in that position, he couldn't admit he was wrong. And he was so very, very wrong.
Not that it matters, but several opportunities were lost, I thought, WRT claims of violence consequent to legalization; low prices deter thievery, availability deters seeking illicit sources, these are obvious but there was no contest offered, which was too bad.
Why I say it doesn't matter is because here, in the context of a Brown university hall, these arguments will have no effect. Half the hall left after the talk and before the Q&A; the level of engagement was minimal. Most of these kids, to be blunt, don't care. They don't care now, when their peers are actively engaged, and they'll care even less when the concern of the day is how to pay back the student loan, the mortgage, and why-o-why did we ever let that pregnancy come to term. The odds of any of them becoming political figures that can make a difference are depressingly low, and frankly, those few are the ones most likely to know better than to try to handle a political hot potato. So really... doesn't matter. A great speaker indeed, but one who wasted an evening unless he found a good restaurant there.
Looking back on the effect he had on his opponent -- none -- consider what would happen if you put this empiricist, full of vigor and data and common sense, up in front of congress. Do you think it would change anything? I don't believe it. The drug war is a cash cow and a power cow and they simply won't let anyone back it down.
That's how I see the coming copyright war. All the signs are there. I sit through four or five warnings on some BDs and DVDs that I have purchased. I'm starting to see absurd monetary awards. Those same warnings point out there are criminal, not civil, penalties for various infringements upon the rights holders. HDMI incorporates HDCP, and my expensive receiver no longer offers the simple ability to record, or to down convert from say, HDMI to component or even composite. The barriers are going up everywhere, and the penalties are being crafted right now, as are the legal precedents that are going to be the bloody edge of the axe that strikes the collective neck of the current and forthcoming generations.
I wish I didn't see it that way. But I do. I hope I'm wrong. But I'm almost certain I'm not.
Other than OSX and the higher price tag; what was the point of the rest of your comment?
The point was, and is, that he's happy with his Mac. I'm sorry you don't get it.
Don't other PCs provide you access to nix and windows VMs?
They don't, however, provide you with access to OSX. It's the combination of all of them, all working at once, that really brings the whupass. And you won't be doing that in any legit, supported fashion on anything but a Mac. That's well worth the candle. See, this is part of the "and you get OSX" point; when Windows is running over there in it's VM, I just drag files into OSX or the other way, share filesystems, run any combination of apps on any OS I like. You may have multiple monitors on your windows machine, but again, you don't have as solid an environment, and you don't have it at all unless you're doing so in a most unsafe and unsupported manner. Which again is fine if that's what you want to do, but the point AGAIN is that not everyone wants to run that way.
Remember how this started: Guy made a harmless remark hoping for X within the context of stuff he liked to run. He got jumped by people criticizing his choice. Surprising? No. Hardly. But it isn't reasonable, either. I'm saying to you, be reasonable. We have our reasons, you have yours, fine, leave off now.
I guess he gets older Xeon processors for his extra money. Cause that's better right. They don't make them like they used to right!!
Sigh. I'm sure you're very happy. Good. Wonderful. KThxBye.
hundreds of millions, if not a billion, people continue to share files, every second of every day
Ongoing activity is not evidence of a "win." Look at the drug war for your benchmark. About a million and a half people are in jail over that in the US alone, the war is wrong in every way that matters, yet it continues, people continue to suffer, the jails overflow.... not a win. In the case of file sharing, the laws and the tech are getting more draconian, not less, and the harm is beginning to spread. Again look at the drug war and see the risk you're facing: Just as in the 60s we did drugs with a "so what" mentality, and then many of us (including me) got swept up and jailed, surprise, the system has teeth and they count. You think facing down the corporate interests with a "so what" mentality will win the day, I'm really afraid you're not only wrong, but wrong in a way that's going to get a lot of people hurt.
Young whippersnappers under 30 don't even *get* what the fuss is about (or why we even *share* (or own) music files when there's spotify, grooveshark, pandora...)
Yes, but again, they don't know very much about it yet, nor do they understand the potential consequences. There's a great deal of "Internet Superman" behavior -- loudmouthery and etc. -- but when it comes time to face the judge, that stuff tends to evaporate like the worthless bluster it is.
Ultimately, the few sporadic *gains* by the bad guys pale in comparison to the sheer number of those who don't feel threatened. Or who rightly believe it's an amoral issue unworthy of their attention.
Again, perfect parallel to drugs in the 60's. While we frolicked in the parks and ran naked through the woods, they were just beginning to wrap their heads around strategies that would become more and more vicious, and they've not stopped to this day. You're at the very beginning of your fight with the copyright holders, and they -- realistically now -- hold all the cards. They own the airwaves. They control the Internet. They know your IP and what you're doing with it. They have congress in their pocket. Congress effectively controls the legal system with very little interference from the judiciary (and even when they do take an interest, they usually side with the corporations and the government.)
The drug war, in the meantime, has turned prison into a for-profit enterprise; it's no longer a negative to the state to incarcerate you (and take all your stuff, ruin your life, etc.) The more, the merrier: They'll just build more prisons and use you as slave labor. So when they begin to really reap the violators -- and you may be dead certain they will -- the prison system is ready to pack you in there like sardines, no problem.
It's not unlike weed use. Are the anti-weed folks winning? Sooner or later (measured in decades...) common sense does indeed prevail. A lot of us may not live long enough to experience it, though.
Now you're beginning to get it. Weed -- only one drug, and one so harmless it's amazing -- is just barely getting traction at the state level, while the feds -- congress and etc. -- continue to maintain the most draconian stance possible. It's been over half a century, and there's been one hell of a lot of suffering just in order to attempt assert the liberty one should have to ingest what one prefers to ingest. It isn't over, and it won't be over for a while, even assuming that in the end, the old, evil men in congress die and people come to power who actually understand liberty and comprehend punishing actual wrongdoing instead of going against every frightening ghost that lives in some weak-minded mother's head and then holding a grudge in the form of creating a permanent lower class of distinctly lower opportunity and economic potential.
Not to put too fine a point on it, he gets OSX, the OSX ecosystem, the vast majority of the *nix ecosystem, the ability to VM several varieties of the Windows ecosystem *or* any one of a number of pure *nix ecosystems, all in parallel if he likes, the ability to drive a bunch of monitors (I've got six on mine), all manner of connectivity, and yes, perhaps last and even perhaps least, probably one of the best cases out there -- it's not just shiny. it's bloody awesome.
I don't even *like* Apple the company -- they piss me off more than I can adequately say for a list of reasons I won't bore you with -- but my Mac Pro was worth every penny for all the things it brings to the table. Could it be better? Yep. Will it be better next time around? Almost certainly.
Now go back to being happy with your stuff, and we'll go back to being happy with ours.
Don't assume that just because something is automated, people who use it are unaware of how it works.
Ok, fair enough. But I can also tell you, quite authoritatively, that you can't assume they are aware of how it works. I've done a great deal of hiring for coding positions, and the number of people who had *any* idea what I was showing them when I dropped a hex listing of binary from *their code* in front them has been nearly zero. Dog help them if it was someone else's code, and dog's own dedicated priest if it was code creating an implied language construct. "Lost" is a word wholly insufficient to the situation, lol.
When I asked about C++-style memory allocation, I really meant more along the lines of RAII
Ah. No, I don't use this type of approach. There's a very straightforward take that is basically (and I mean basically):
if (go-get-memory())
{
try_to_do_thing_that_required_memory();
release-memory();
}
The above approach works in just about any context imaginable as long as you design your code such that it doesn't get broken out of processes along broken paths. Those precautions range from "don't divide by zero" to checking parameters before calling a math library... always good practice anyway. You can't trust users at all, and I tend to assume that hardware will give you any combination of bits in any order, so you'd better make sure you got what you thought you were getting before you attempt to process it. My circle of trust tends to end with the CPU instructions themselves.
My memory stuff can be configured to check and firewall every allocation at defined intervals, or just at termination, etc. During development, I turn it up to 11, as it were, and so can verify there are zero leaks, period. Compiling for release can take out some or all of the checks and gain back some speed. I don't use goto in my code -- ever -- because I've never encountered a situation where if() and subsequent block structure couldn't naturally control the code flow adequately. I also don't intentionally throw exceptions, same reason. If stuff can fail, it is my opinion that I should have been looking for the failure in the first place, and had a plan to deal with it in the second.
Would you say that it is important for most programmers to know what goes on at the bare metal even if they don't have those requirements?
For c programmers, I would. For other languages that aren't by their very nature so close to the metal anyway, not so much. In c, you can leverage that knowledge easily, if you have it, across everything you write. In Python, for instance, you mostly can't unless you're writing Python-to-Other or Other-to-Python code, which most people don't do.
c, in my view, occupies a unique position; it's almost assembly language. It's as close as we've been able to get, anyway, with the possible exception of forth-like languages, and it's uniformly compiled -- sometimes pretty well. ASM itself has these huge portability issues, and C obviates those, for which we are usually grateful. It abstracts only the CPU register and specific instruction set models, while leaving almost everything else up to us. It doesn't go too far, as languages that created interpreted word-code do, spending significant amounts of CPU power figuring out, again, what the program actually wants to do. You get extreme portability there -- not even a recompile -- but you lose too much power. And compiling's just not that big a deal. Or shouldn't be. And when you compile, you end up with actual machine instructions directly doing what you wanted done. In a world of really fast CPUs, this has gone from "I need it" to "holy dog, look at that thing blister!" My SDR work wouldn't even be practical outside of C unless I went right for ASM, and that's just a bad idea, I'm afraid.
From real to-the-metal compiled code, the direct and efficient control of memory is a huge hammer that can be made useful in an almost infinite variety of ways, but you do have to understand exactly what you're doing. You still need to understand about CPUs that don't like certain types of memory boundaries, you need to understand byte/word order issues, you need to understand how stacks are actually being used, what happens when you prod I/O hardware and so forth, caching behavior(s), DMA impacts, and in the bad old days when memory wasn't guaranteed to be flat... ugh. Smegma registers.
So yes, absolutely in the case of C coders... and C++ coders. I've always leaned towards programmers who have deep assembly experience; even more so towards those that have at least moderate digital design skills and deep assembly experience. Combine that with c and you've got something special. Such people tend to be real stars in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong. Also very presumptuous. There are many things a high powered sports car can do safely and legally that your average mommy sedan or SUV cannot. The vehicles can reduce all kinds of risk (passing with much larger safety margins, better [safer] stopping, better [safer] cornering), as it turns out, both the horsepower and the sporty handling can come in quite handy.
That's exactly how I drove mine for the last few decades. No speeding tickets because -- ready -- no speeding. No patching out, no taking corners faster than posted (although I was *definitely* taking the corners significantly more safely than non sports vehicles were.) The only downside, really, was that to get the most out of the thing, I had to use soft compound tires, and they just don't last as long, and they cost a lot, and they scrub off like a rat bastard when you have to make a sudden stop (deer, other road hazards.) I have some truly hair-raising stories about putting flat spots on my tires -- but were it a lesser vehicle, the stories would have been about front-end impacts.
All this, in a car that got decent milage (twin turbos ftw) and easily exceeded your 350 HP line in the sand. If I had *wanted* to speed and otherwise misbehave, it was right there at my fingertips. I leave it as an exercise for you to imagine why I never did.
ok... ok... so what we need to do, then, is kill all the physicists.
That's when you remotely detonate the mines off the end of the runway.
Polarize the cockpit windows so that light from a lower angle is blocked; then provide a low angle view with a couple of cameras, one that only sees in green, one that only sees in red, and digitally process them so that the one that isn't blocking is the one you see.
Also, hang a couple of optically tracking missiles under the fuselage; when a laser is detected, send the missile down the reciprocal angle, following the laser. Doesn't even need a warhead. I'll wager that a 500...1000 mph impact from a 10 lb missile would seriously impede the idiot holding the laser without a lot of collateral damage. Well, maybe some. Oh well. :)
Cameras on the wingtips, assuming the thing has wings.
Helicopters, not so much.
[points laser pointer at government report, which turns brown, then goes up in flames]
No... no, I think that's about right.
Viewing angle is one of the factors missing from the stereo-vision hack being marketed as "3d" today. Another is focal depth.
Supplying 64 different angles of view is (barely) a start. It'll still foul up your visual processing, though, because the focus cues to your brain are entirely wrong. And that, unfortunately, leads to neurological problems like headaches.
You're not going to see actual 3d displays for a while. First we need the tech, then we need it standardized so manufacturers have a consistent target to shoot for, then we need content, for which we're going to need new recording tech...
Don't hold your breath.
Well said.
Yes, they just live under a new dictatorship, a religious one, one that is completely unable to maintain civil order but has no problem whatsoever imposing a rule just as oppressive as the one Saddam did. As for WWII, there was a real threat to be countered there, one of hugely more power and intent than anything Saddam ever even dreamed of. The one time he actually tried something along those lines (Kuwait), he got stepped on like a bug and ran home to mommy, which was fine.
There's no question that when a country steps outside of its own borders and makes war on others without the specific pretext of stopping exactly that act, it must be stopped. Unfortunately, the country that fits that definition in the case of the 2nd Iraq war is not Iraq -- it is the USA. Even more unfortunately, there is no one big enough to stop us, or even slow us down, when we do evil things.
What countries do within their own borders must be the business of that country. If you think otherwise, you just completely justified an invasion of the USA by anyone who cares to do it for failure to abide by its own constitution. Our leadership is corrupt from top to bottom - executive, judiciary, legislature, political parties - and our actions reprehensible by our own standards. But I suspect you'd say that it's entirely our job to work out our own problems. What concerns me is that you would not say the same for the Iraqis.
This was not true prior to the US invasion. It is a consequence of the US invasion.
Neither could Iraq. The only difference was that there was a country so big and powerful that it made no difference. We imposed our will on them in the oldest, most vile manner possible: By murderous force, without any right, on a sovereign country.
By every measure, the 2nd Iraq war was unjustified, the consequences horrific, the perpetrators criminal, and by that, I don't mean the pawns, the soldiers, but those who steered this ship of terror, Bush and Cheney and every minion they had that participated in the faking of intelligence and the misdirecting of the public as to any involvement whatsoever with 9/11.
But overlaying all of this is the simple truth that collectively: we cannot trust our government, we cannot control our government, and we do not care enough to do anything about it.
This has been true for some time, from things we allow it to do to us, from the war on drugs to the fear-mongering used to crush our liberties subsequent to 9/11, to the completely unjustified actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 9/11 perpetrators were mostly Saudi with 2...3 from Egypt, Lebanon and the UAE. No one from Afghanistan, no one from Iraq. The justification that they went to school in Iraq kind of skips over the idea that more of them went to school in the UK and Saudi Arabia. The idea that OBL was hiding there so we had to destroy an entire country to get at him was both wrong, and not really justified by the fact that he was pleased, but surprised, to hear that we had been attacked. The fact that we shot him when we had overwhelming force on our side and didn't bring him to any witness stand is, at least, suspicious.
Do I claim to know what happened? No. But I will say this: if you step back from the official story, the first thing you note is that this puzzle fits together really, really badly if you use the lines drawn by the US government. It's likely, IMHO, to be close to the real truth -- the best and most enduring lies usually are -- but it clearly isn't the truth. We know of many problems: There were no aluminum rods being used for centrifuges. There were no WMDs. Neither country -- Iraq or Afghanistan -- had much, if anything, to do with our being attacked. Saddam had, in fact, given us access to every site of any consequence. Almost everything Bush and Cheney said was distorted or outright false. Both undertakings failed to even vaguely resemble the minimalist interventions we were sold.
The lesson is that the government has control of the picture they present, and that we will, no matter if the consequence is our liberties at home or the lives of others across the sea, accept that picture and back them in almost any action.
I prefer the explanation that begins with what the Gaussian lays at my feet: More than half the people are really, really stupid. All of the people are subject to heavy attempts at deception to get them to comply. Even very smart people will fall prey to this until they obtain data that comes from sources that are not mangling it to fit a false picture.
I don't think we can fix this. Under the present model, our congress and judiciary are wholly bought and paid for, entrenched in a way that the public really doesn't understand through political leadership that transcends elections and lobbyists that exert the will of a privileged few who are subject to zero oversight by the public.
As to Twitter, Twitter is a form of the voice of the public, but it's really no different in its reach than the voices of big forums (and search engines) ten years ago, and there were plenty of those, including this one. Twitter is different in that 140 characters isn't enough to make a case for anything; I refer you to this very post: You may completely disagree with me, and if you do, likely you'll couch that disagreement in the form of a claim that I haven't made my case, even though I took the time to cite quite a few facts which you can easily confirm supporting it. Imagine if I had tried to use twitter to make the same case -- would
Prepare for some incoming.
It was. That's exactly what I'm saying. Here comes the copyright war. Enjoy the ride.
Look at the drug war, and see if you can say that again with a straight face. I'd submit you should have used "and" instead of "not."
Some content does. Notably movies. Music, not so much. I'm a musician, I have a complete 32 track studio in my home, along with a full band's worth of instruments. If you brought me several rhythm guitarists, a singer, a keyboard player, a bassist, a drummer and a lead player, all without gear, I could set them up, record them, either together or by individual tracks, and produce a high quality master CD for them for zero cost beyond what I've already invested -- and what I've invested (some years back now) is less than a cheap car, and even that was far more than you'd have to spend today to do the same thing. Or, if I went acoustic, I could walk into a bar, sit down, and begin to play and sing. No cost other than my time. Dinner, a few beers (not too many or the performance... ugh, lol) maybe a few bucks in a hat... that'd make it practical, if the audiences found me worthy. Attention from the opposite sex used to go a long way too, though today, I'm settled down.
So bands... no. Most television productions aren't worth a plugged nickel. The acting is terrible, the scripts worse. Something like Avatar or the new Star Trek... some spending happening there and no way around it as yet. Less in the future, I think, but still, gotta give your point to you on that front. All I can say there is I own both recordings; not even a slight urge to grab them for free. Well worth the cost. I'd like to be able to back them up, lest something happen like what happened to Heavy Metal (rights bitch fight), or perhaps one of the kids using it for a clay pigeon, etc. I can't.
No, you really can't make that argument. There wouldn't have been any music, opera, plays, street performers prior to about 1920 if that was the case. But there were. There are other forms of funding that the arts can extract from society than direct charge for recordings. We can ague the merit of those methods, but you can't say they didn't work, because they most assuredly did. I suspect they'd work again, and in such an environment, we'd see some very fine performers, as well as a good bit more variety. But that is, of course, just my opinion.
What you're missing here is that music, and I presume other forms of performance are, is a joy to produce. I'd kick you out of the way to get a space to play. It's not always about money. Ask yourself if you'd have to be paid to have sex. It's kind of like that. I couldn't tell you how many times I've played for free, both solo and with bands. And I'm pretty good -- fifty years of experience now, rock, blues, hard rock, even some folk, that's me. I just love music and performing musically, and that's true for a very large portion of the other musicians I've known over the years. Fame isn't the prime motivator for everyone, nor is money. Sex, well, yeah. ;)
This is an excellent strategy and I encourage you to pursue it. I always buy a CD from a live performance, if they offer one. Or several, hell, I'll buy your whole catalog if given a chance and you gave me a nice evening.
What you have to do, though, to make that strategy really effective, is get everyone you know to pursue it, and they their acquaintances, etc., ad infinitum.
Just back after watching it through.
Several things. The irony of the prohibitionist saying that people using drugs could never admit they were wrong and so needed to be stood up to, during an evening where a great deal of what he was saying was wrong, and people were standing up to him, was quite poignant.
The lesson here is that even when the arguments are couched in terms of empirical data, the prohibitionists are in no way inclined to listen. The defender of drug prohibition was an ex-government figure; even outside the context of having to back the administration that put him in that position, he couldn't admit he was wrong. And he was so very, very wrong.
Not that it matters, but several opportunities were lost, I thought, WRT claims of violence consequent to legalization; low prices deter thievery, availability deters seeking illicit sources, these are obvious but there was no contest offered, which was too bad.
Why I say it doesn't matter is because here, in the context of a Brown university hall, these arguments will have no effect. Half the hall left after the talk and before the Q&A; the level of engagement was minimal. Most of these kids, to be blunt, don't care. They don't care now, when their peers are actively engaged, and they'll care even less when the concern of the day is how to pay back the student loan, the mortgage, and why-o-why did we ever let that pregnancy come to term. The odds of any of them becoming political figures that can make a difference are depressingly low, and frankly, those few are the ones most likely to know better than to try to handle a political hot potato. So really ... doesn't matter. A great speaker indeed, but one who wasted an evening unless he found a good restaurant there.
Looking back on the effect he had on his opponent -- none -- consider what would happen if you put this empiricist, full of vigor and data and common sense, up in front of congress. Do you think it would change anything? I don't believe it. The drug war is a cash cow and a power cow and they simply won't let anyone back it down.
That's how I see the coming copyright war. All the signs are there. I sit through four or five warnings on some BDs and DVDs that I have purchased. I'm starting to see absurd monetary awards. Those same warnings point out there are criminal, not civil, penalties for various infringements upon the rights holders. HDMI incorporates HDCP, and my expensive receiver no longer offers the simple ability to record, or to down convert from say, HDMI to component or even composite. The barriers are going up everywhere, and the penalties are being crafted right now, as are the legal precedents that are going to be the bloody edge of the axe that strikes the collective neck of the current and forthcoming generations.
I wish I didn't see it that way. But I do. I hope I'm wrong. But I'm almost certain I'm not.
The point was, and is, that he's happy with his Mac. I'm sorry you don't get it.
They don't, however, provide you with access to OSX. It's the combination of all of them, all working at once, that really brings the whupass. And you won't be doing that in any legit, supported fashion on anything but a Mac. That's well worth the candle. See, this is part of the "and you get OSX" point; when Windows is running over there in it's VM, I just drag files into OSX or the other way, share filesystems, run any combination of apps on any OS I like. You may have multiple monitors on your windows machine, but again, you don't have as solid an environment, and you don't have it at all unless you're doing so in a most unsafe and unsupported manner. Which again is fine if that's what you want to do, but the point AGAIN is that not everyone wants to run that way.
Remember how this started: Guy made a harmless remark hoping for X within the context of stuff he liked to run. He got jumped by people criticizing his choice. Surprising? No. Hardly. But it isn't reasonable, either. I'm saying to you, be reasonable. We have our reasons, you have yours, fine, leave off now.
Sigh. I'm sure you're very happy. Good. Wonderful. KThxBye.
No.
Ongoing activity is not evidence of a "win." Look at the drug war for your benchmark. About a million and a half people are in jail over that in the US alone, the war is wrong in every way that matters, yet it continues, people continue to suffer, the jails overflow.... not a win. In the case of file sharing, the laws and the tech are getting more draconian, not less, and the harm is beginning to spread. Again look at the drug war and see the risk you're facing: Just as in the 60s we did drugs with a "so what" mentality, and then many of us (including me) got swept up and jailed, surprise, the system has teeth and they count. You think facing down the corporate interests with a "so what" mentality will win the day, I'm really afraid you're not only wrong, but wrong in a way that's going to get a lot of people hurt.
Yes, but again, they don't know very much about it yet, nor do they understand the potential consequences. There's a great deal of "Internet Superman" behavior -- loudmouthery and etc. -- but when it comes time to face the judge, that stuff tends to evaporate like the worthless bluster it is.
Again, perfect parallel to drugs in the 60's. While we frolicked in the parks and ran naked through the woods, they were just beginning to wrap their heads around strategies that would become more and more vicious, and they've not stopped to this day. You're at the very beginning of your fight with the copyright holders, and they -- realistically now -- hold all the cards. They own the airwaves. They control the Internet. They know your IP and what you're doing with it. They have congress in their pocket. Congress effectively controls the legal system with very little interference from the judiciary (and even when they do take an interest, they usually side with the corporations and the government.)
The drug war, in the meantime, has turned prison into a for-profit enterprise; it's no longer a negative to the state to incarcerate you (and take all your stuff, ruin your life, etc.) The more, the merrier: They'll just build more prisons and use you as slave labor. So when they begin to really reap the violators -- and you may be dead certain they will -- the prison system is ready to pack you in there like sardines, no problem.
Now you're beginning to get it. Weed -- only one drug, and one so harmless it's amazing -- is just barely getting traction at the state level, while the feds -- congress and etc. -- continue to maintain the most draconian stance possible. It's been over half a century, and there's been one hell of a lot of suffering just in order to attempt assert the liberty one should have to ingest what one prefers to ingest. It isn't over, and it won't be over for a while, even assuming that in the end, the old, evil men in congress die and people come to power who actually understand liberty and comprehend punishing actual wrongdoing instead of going against every frightening ghost that lives in some weak-minded mother's head and then holding a grudge in the form of creating a permanent lower class of distinctly lower opportunity and economic potential.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it doesn't seem to be working.
ok, how?
Not to put too fine a point on it, he gets OSX, the OSX ecosystem, the vast majority of the *nix ecosystem, the ability to VM several varieties of the Windows ecosystem *or* any one of a number of pure *nix ecosystems, all in parallel if he likes, the ability to drive a bunch of monitors (I've got six on mine), all manner of connectivity, and yes, perhaps last and even perhaps least, probably one of the best cases out there -- it's not just shiny. it's bloody awesome.
I don't even *like* Apple the company -- they piss me off more than I can adequately say for a list of reasons I won't bore you with -- but my Mac Pro was worth every penny for all the things it brings to the table. Could it be better? Yep. Will it be better next time around? Almost certainly.
Now go back to being happy with your stuff, and we'll go back to being happy with ours.
Not so. Neither goto or exceptions are required. They're a matter of choice (and IMHO, bad choice.)
Ok, fair enough. But I can also tell you, quite authoritatively, that you can't assume they are aware of how it works. I've done a great deal of hiring for coding positions, and the number of people who had *any* idea what I was showing them when I dropped a hex listing of binary from *their code* in front them has been nearly zero. Dog help them if it was someone else's code, and dog's own dedicated priest if it was code creating an implied language construct. "Lost" is a word wholly insufficient to the situation, lol.
Ah. No, I don't use this type of approach. There's a very straightforward take that is basically (and I mean basically):
if (go-get-memory())
{
try_to_do_thing_that_required_memory();
release-memory();
}
The above approach works in just about any context imaginable as long as you design your code such that it doesn't get broken out of processes along broken paths. Those precautions range from "don't divide by zero" to checking parameters before calling a math library... always good practice anyway. You can't trust users at all, and I tend to assume that hardware will give you any combination of bits in any order, so you'd better make sure you got what you thought you were getting before you attempt to process it. My circle of trust tends to end with the CPU instructions themselves.
My memory stuff can be configured to check and firewall every allocation at defined intervals, or just at termination, etc. During development, I turn it up to 11, as it were, and so can verify there are zero leaks, period. Compiling for release can take out some or all of the checks and gain back some speed. I don't use goto in my code -- ever -- because I've never encountered a situation where if() and subsequent block structure couldn't naturally control the code flow adequately. I also don't intentionally throw exceptions, same reason. If stuff can fail, it is my opinion that I should have been looking for the failure in the first place, and had a plan to deal with it in the second.
For c programmers, I would. For other languages that aren't by their very nature so close to the metal anyway, not so much. In c, you can leverage that knowledge easily, if you have it, across everything you write. In Python, for instance, you mostly can't unless you're writing Python-to-Other or Other-to-Python code, which most people don't do.
c, in my view, occupies a unique position; it's almost assembly language. It's as close as we've been able to get, anyway, with the possible exception of forth-like languages, and it's uniformly compiled -- sometimes pretty well. ASM itself has these huge portability issues, and C obviates those, for which we are usually grateful. It abstracts only the CPU register and specific instruction set models, while leaving almost everything else up to us. It doesn't go too far, as languages that created interpreted word-code do, spending significant amounts of CPU power figuring out, again, what the program actually wants to do. You get extreme portability there -- not even a recompile -- but you lose too much power. And compiling's just not that big a deal. Or shouldn't be. And when you compile, you end up with actual machine instructions directly doing what you wanted done. In a world of really fast CPUs, this has gone from "I need it" to "holy dog, look at that thing blister!" My SDR work wouldn't even be practical outside of C unless I went right for ASM, and that's just a bad idea, I'm afraid.
From real to-the-metal compiled code, the direct and efficient control of memory is a huge hammer that can be made useful in an almost infinite variety of ways, but you do have to understand exactly what you're doing. You still need to understand about CPUs that don't like certain types of memory boundaries, you need to understand byte/word order issues, you need to understand how stacks are actually being used, what happens when you prod I/O hardware and so forth, caching behavior(s), DMA impacts, and in the bad old days when memory wasn't guaranteed to be flat... ugh. Smegma registers.
So yes, absolutely in the case of C coders... and C++ coders. I've always leaned towards programmers who have deep assembly experience; even more so towards those that have at least moderate digital design skills and deep assembly experience. Combine that with c and you've got something special. Such people tend to be real stars in the long run.